From Bruce Schneier’s “Basketball Referees and Single Points of Failure” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA games, or whatever — are most at risk of being manipulated? The ones where the smallest change can have the greatest impact, and the ones where trusted insiders can make that change.
…
It’s not [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security | No Comments »
From Jono DiCarlo’s “Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software” (5 October 2007):
Do
Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no†to features that don’t fit the vision.
Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
Don’t rely on configurable [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Mary A. Dempsey’s “Fordlandia” (Michigan History: July/August 1994):
Screens were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros (rubber gatherers) by distributing [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, technology | Comments Off
From Alan Bellows’s “The Ruins of Fordlândia” (Damn Interesting: 3 August 2006):
On Villares’ advice, [Henry] Ford purchased a 25,000 square kilometer tract of land along the Amazon river, and immediately began to develop the area. …
Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community sprung up [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, technology, weird | Comments Off
From Laura Miller’s “Rent-a-coup” (Salon: 17 August 2006):
In March 2004, a group of men with a hired army of about 70 mercenary soldiers set out to topple the government of the tiny West African nation of Equatorial Guinea and install a new one. Ostensibly led by a political opposition leader but actually controlled by the [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
DVD players are factory-built with a set of keys. When a DVD is inserted, the player runs through every key it knows until one unlocks the disc. Once this disc key is known, the player uses it to retrieve a title key from the [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Mook’s “Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace” (Beta News: 13 October 2005):
One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nanette Asimov’s “Software glitch reveals private data for thousands of state’s students” (San Francisco Chronicle: 21 October 2005):
The personal information of tens of thousands of California children — including their names, state achievement test scores, identification numbers and status in gifted or special-needs programs — is open to public view through a security loophole [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, education, security, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made in an ordinary job. That’s the sense in which startups pay better “on average.”
Remember that. If you start a [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Airport Passenger Screening” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns, and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, science, security, technology | Comments Off
From The New York Times‘ “Form Follows Function. Now Go Out and Cut the Grass.“:
Failure, [Henry] Petroski shows, works. Or rather, engineers only learn from things that fail: bridges that collapse, software that crashes, spacecraft that explode. Everything that is designed fails, and everything that fails leads to better design. Next time at least that [...]
Posted on May 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, science | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:
What is the Semantic Web good for?
The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, language & literature, technology | Comments Off
From TechWeb News’s “One In Four Identity-Theft Victims Never Fully Recover“:
Making things right after a stolen identity can take months and cost thousands, a survey of identity theft victims released Tuesday said. Worse, in more than one in four cases, victims haven’t been able to completely restore their good name.
The survey, conducted by Nationwide Mutual [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Federico Biancuzzi’s “John the Ripper 1.7, by Solar Designer“:
John the Ripper 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots [...]
Posted on April 8th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Computerworld (13 October 1997), page 76:
A computer glitch at a New York brokerage causes a half-million customer accounts to be credited with $19 million each for a brief period. At $9.975 trillion ($19 million times 525,000 accounts), it’s a record for a computer error.
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Posted on November 13th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
From Red Herring:
The key distinction is between failing and losing. Failing means getting blocked on an intended course, backing out, and restarting. Losing means persisting in your failing ways, refusing to change your current course, and instead putting significant effort into justifying the course. Worse yet, it means getting defensive whenever you are challenged about [...]
Posted on November 1st, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off